„16 talented participants enter the game. Only 2 will walk out alive. Don’t let history repeat itself. Break the cycle.“
Project: Eden’s Garden 「模倣」is a Free-To-Play video game inspired by the popular visual novel series known as Danganronpa by Spike Chunsoft Co., Ltd. While this game will be heavily influenced by the property, it will be an original story with diverse characters and gameplay experiences. The Team developing behind it is working entirely free and out of passion for the Danganronpa Franchise.
My Contributions:
16 Students with exceptional Talent in their fields have been accepted at Eden’s Garden Academy, a prestigious school to find the best and brightest of America’s youth. With its first ever class of Ultimate (title granted by the academy; describes said individuals with remarkable skill/talent in their respective field of study) students, things are not so clear when Damon Maitsu, the Ultimate Debater, finds himself waking up in a strange academy. With his 15 other classmates stuck in the same situation, they are told that a killing game will commence. It’s up to Damon and his classmates to survive this killing game, and uncover the secrets that lay buried under the mystery that surrounds Eden’s Garden Academy.
Character Showcase
In Project: Eden’s Garden, all Levels a segmented into their respective areas in which the Player can freely interact with. The Game follows 2 core Mechanics that are fundamental in Level Design: Exploration & Interaction.
As this Project is taking inspiration from the Original IP, we decided to lay down similar Design Rules for our Environments defined 2 Types of Levels:
3D Environments
For the Development of 3D-Environments, I used the standard workflow of Conception, Level Blockout & Design, Lighting and detailed the Scenes to make them more Interactive. All Level segments were supervised, implemented & finalized to the Unity Engine by me.
2.5D Levels
Unlike typical 3D Environments, Danganronpa limited certain Rooms or Areas by only granting Camera Movement from a fixed Angle of the Scene. We used the same methodology in our Project, and prioritized adding more Detail that are closer towards the Player Camera. To highlight elements to be interacted with, we used an unlit Shader to emphasize their validity, and included a mode to filter out all the non-interactable ones.
For this Project, we are using a modified version of the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) Shader by Unity, with a custom Shader with unlit Attributes for Interactable Objects. The Lighting Process for each Room is handled differently for aesthetic reasons, as I didn’t set a standard Lighting Profile for all Scenes, albeit they share the same Values.
I used the Progressive GPU Lightmapper for rendering out internal Lighting for all Scenes, with Ambient Occlusion enabled (in some instances disabled). The main Lighting Modes used for these Environments are Shadowmask & Baked Indirect Lighting. In terms of Texel Resolution for Lightmaps I typically render in between the range of 35-45 texels per unit with uncrompressed Lightmap generation on a max size of 2048×2048.
I was assigned to model out and UV-Unwrap all 3D-Assets / Rooms for the Project. The Pipeline process was shared amongst the other Team members in this Project, supervised by a Lead and documented via a spreadsheet.
As a key role for being a Producer, my job in this project is to oversee Project Management, Marketing Decisions and managing Social Media Accounts. I have also been tasked to generate content and regular Updates for the Community, to ensure progress is being made on this game. Henceforth, I was supervising Update-Videos, which should display what the current status of the Project is, as well as what we are currently working on. Here are a few examples:
More recently, the Team has created a Localization Team that is currently translating Videos from the Youtube Channel and the first Chapter of Project: Eden’s Garden in French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portugese, Russian & Spanish (Castilian, Latin). It’s an initiative both made by the community and from the Team to reach out to more fans. Here are is an example from one of our Dev-Vlogs:
In the role as a QA Tester, there initially was no Bug-Database to preview & verify bugs. For the sake clarity in Production for this Project, I documented every bug that occured in our weekly playtest and marked it with a respective status. If certain bugs contained logs or Links to Videos, I attached them and let the Engineers know. Here is a snippet on how it was organized:
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